


Breaking the Cycle

by Kamemor



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: (although you'll only notice if you squint), (ie. references to Hotch and Morgan's backstories), Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, References to Canon-Typical Violence, written with autistic headcanons in mind
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-02
Updated: 2017-04-02
Packaged: 2018-10-13 14:06:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10515282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kamemor/pseuds/Kamemor
Summary: Or, "Hotch Gets a Much Needed Talking-To"An epilogue to s2e03, 'The Perfect Storm'. Hotch is sitting on the jet and stewing over their latest UnSub's backstory, once again worrying about cycles of abuse and what they might mean for his own family. Gideon realises this, and decides it's well past time he explained to his friend- in great detail and at length- exactly how unfair he's being to himself by worrying about that.





	

From where he sat at one end of the jet’s passenger cabin, Jason Gideon observed his team. Scattered around the plane, they were all going about their usual decompression rituals, mentally shifting gears out of active case mode and starting to consign the events of the past week to the territory of dry reports and past precedent. Morgan and Elle were sat on either side of the couch, both plugged into their mp3 players. Morgan had his eyes closed, although the way he was nodding his head along to the beat indicated he wasn’t asleep. Elle looked to be getting a headstart on her paperwork, but the way she kept staring out the window suggested that, understandably, her heart wasn’t in it. Reid sat across from Gideon, nursing a cup of coffee and reading one of the several large hardbacks he always seemed to carry in his leather satchel. JJ had moved to sit next to him about half an hour previously and, although she’d started out attempting to read over his shoulder (a difficult task even when the young genius wasn’t speed-reading at 20,000 words a minute), she’d eventually dozed off in her seat.

The only member of the team Gideon couldn’t see was Hotch, and that worried him somewhat. It was never a good sign when Hotch felt the need to sit on his own, facing away from the rest of the team. It didn’t take a profiler to see that he was distancing himself, or to realise the why of it. Something about the case had gotten to him. And, as was his habit, Hotch was dealing with it by cutting himself off from anyone who might notice or care that he was having a hard time. It was a bad habit. Coming from Jason Gideon that was rather a case of a pot calling a kettle black, but Gideon preferred another aphorism: ‘do as I say, not as I do.’

So he got up out of his seat, made his way down the aisle of the plane, and sat down heavily in the seat opposite his former-protege-turned-unit-chief. Hotch seemed to be asleep, but Gideon could always tell when he was faking. Waiting a few minutes to give Hotch a chance to initiate an interaction on his own, Gideon took the time to observe the younger man.

Feigning sleep as he was, his arms folded tightly across his chest and his head resting on his shoulder, Hotch looked far younger than his 42 years. In fact, if it weren’t for the shorter hair, Gideon could almost mistake him for the fresh-faced, eager young agent who had transferred from the Seattle field office to the BAU way back in 1997. Ten years, they’d been working together. In that time, Gideon had seen him finally marry his longterm girlfriend, rise through the ranks until he was promoted to unit chief, and even become a father. He’d also seen him through much harder events: the first time he’d been shot in the line of duty, the first time a victim had died in his arms, the first killer he’d been forced to let get away for lack of evidence. And each one of those times Hotch had done exactly what he was doing now. He’d pulled away, shut down, refused to let anyone in until Gideon had lost patience with the spiral of self-destructiveness and forced his way past the defenses. It hadn’t always worked. Jason Gideon had a reputation for stubbornness, but Aaron Hotchner could out-stubborn him any day. It was a useful skill in their line of work, but here, now? All Hotch was doing was hurting himself, and Gideon wasn’t going to let him do it any longer.

Several minutes had passed by this point, and Gideon could now be pretty confident that Hotch wasn’t going to engage with him first. Oh, well; so be it. He took one last look down the cabin, making sure that the others were all otherwise occupied and thus unlikely to overhear, and spoke.

“Hotch,” he said, quietly but firmly. “I know you’re faking it.” Hotch stirred, taking a deep breath in and then huffing it out through his nose in a sigh. He unfolded his arms, rubbed his eyes with a hand, and then fixed Gideon with a defiant stare. Gideon just gazed levelly back at him and then asked, softly, “How are you doing?” Hotch held his gaze for a long moment, and then sighed again, the defiance in his eyes fading to a deep weariness.

“How do you think?” he said, his voice even softer than usual. Jason grimaced in sympathy.

“That bad, huh? So what did she say to you?” If Hotch was surprised by the leap, he didn’t show it. Gideon hadn’t been there when Hotch and Morgan had apprehended Amber Canardo red-handed with her would-be ninth victim, but he could guess that she wouldn’t have passed up an opportunity to get in the last word.

“Believe me, she’ll never be the same,” Hotch quoted, staring briefly out the window as he relived the moment. Then he looked back at Gideon, a haunted look in his eyes, before dropping his gaze to his hands, which were clenched in his lap. “And I do believe her. We both saw what they did to those girls, Jason. Yes, we stopped Amber from killing her, but Tiffany Spears is going to be living with the fallout from that torture for the rest of her life.” He briefly unclenched his hands, gesturing vaguely with one of them as if to imply the enormity of that trauma.

“That’s not what’s bothering you, though,” said Gideon. Hotch looked up at him sharply, so he backtracked, softening the implications of that statement. “At least, that’s not all that is.” Hotch seemed too tired to argue, which in itself was an indicator of how rattled he was, and folded his arms instead. Hotch folded his arms a lot, Gideon had observed over the long years he'd known him, and it could mean a great many different things. Like Reid’s finger-flicking or his own hand-wringing, it ranged from a concentration aid to a means of self-comfort, in addition to the more traditional confrontational or defensive interpretation. In this particular instance, it was self-comfort, so Gideon wasn’t surprised when Hotch left an opening for him to continue.

“So what is it that’s really bothering me, Jason?” Hotch asked with a sigh. Somehow the ban on intra-team profiling never seemed to hold between the two of them, and for once Hotch seemed resigned to that fact, or maybe even grateful of it.

“Amber,” Gideon said simply. “She was abused and she became an abuser. What she said reminded you of that; she was talking about herself as much as her victim. Talking about you as well, although there’s no way she could have known that.” Hotch just held Gideon’s gaze, that deep weariness joined by something that looked a little like fear. Or maybe even shame. Gideon sighed and leaned forward, putting his hands on Hotch’s knees and pressing down. It was a risky move- Hotch was extremely protective of his personal space- but when he didn’t flinch away from the contact Gideon judged it a successful strategy and forged ahead.

“Hotch, I’ve told you before, and I’m going to keep telling you until it sinks into that stubborn head of yours: of all the people I’ve ever met, you’re the last person I would ever think capable of abusing someone else.” Hotch looked like he was about to argue, but Gideon shook his head, anticipating what he was going to say. “Suspects don’t count, neither do UnSubs. That’s your job, and besides, you know as well as I do that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about innocents. Women, children, the people you took this job in order to protect. You’re no more capable of raising a hand to someone under your protection than Morgan is of- of molesting someone.” That got a reaction, but it was more one of indignation that he’d given voice to another man’s secrets. Gideon almost rolled his eyes. Hotch was so quick to defend others but then turned around and saw the worst in himself. It was that very quality that proved Gideon’s point, but of course Hotch couldn’t see that for himself.

“My point,” Gideon said quickly, so he didn’t lose his stubborn audience, “is that you both had the complete opposite reaction to being victimised to people like Amber Canardo or Vincent Perotta.” He deliberately mentioned the name of the mob hitman they’d apprehended the previous year, who had been the last UnSub to cause this kind of reaction in Hotch and whose past had had even more in common with Hotch’s own than Canardo’s. “They lashed out, hurt others the way they’d been hurt, became abusers themselves. But you and Morgan, you’re different.” He deliberately stuck with Morgan, hoping that Hotch would be less likely to try and refute his point if it would reflect badly on the other man as well. It was probably a dirty tactic, but hey, if it worked, it worked.

“The two of you, you became protectors. Morgan protected that boy in Chicago, you protected your brother from even the knowledge of who your father was. What, you think I didn’t notice that he doesn’t know the truth?” he said, in response to Hotch’s small frown of surprise. “For god’s sake, Hotch, you joined the FBI because being a prosecutor wasn’t helping people enough. Think like a profiler: does that sound like a man who’s ever gonna raise a hand to his own son? Huh?” He gave Hotch’s knee an emphatic shake. “Physician, heal thyself.”

Hotch, who had sat still and largely impassive through most of Gideon’s well-meaning haranguing, finally took a deep breath and rubbed his face with both hands, pausing with the heels of his hands over his eyes and his fingers in his hair.

“I know, Jason, it’s just…” He trailed off, still unable to voice his fears. Gideon gave his knees one last squeeze, then let go and sat back in his seat again. Now that Gideon was out of his personal space, Hotch’s hands fell back down into his lap.

“Hotch, you worry too much," Gideon said, letting his serious tone relax into something slightly more conversational to let Hotch know that he’d now pretty much said his piece. "Give yourself a bit more credit, huh? And give me a bit more credit, will ya?” Hotch frowned at that, not understanding. “You think I wouldn’t kick your ass the second I saw you even think about sliding down that particular slope?” Gideon gave him a small, lopsided smile. “Come on.” Hotch returned the expression with the smallest quirk of his lips.

“You might have to enlist Morgan’s help for that,” he said, his voice still soft but stronger than it had been all conversation. There was even a hint of humour in his words, if not the tone. But that was Hotch for you- endlessly deadpan.

“Oh, really? You think I can’t take you in a fight?” Gideon said, running with it. He’d said all that he had to say for the time being. Now it was up to Hotch to digest it, and the joking teasing was his way of indicating that he needed an out from the heavier conversation in order to get the time to do that.

“Not even if you were ten years younger and I had one arm tied behind my back,” said Hotch, his eyes actually sparkling slightly with humour despite the still-present weariness.

“Oh, so that’s how it is?” said Gideon, raising his eyebrows.

“That’s how it is,” said Hotch, his own eyebrows quirking upwards and his small smile getting a fraction wider. Gideon chuckled.

“If you say so, tough guy” he said, levering himself up out of his seat and starting to make his way back to the other end of the plane. He paused briefly to pat Hotch once on the shoulder. “If you say so.”

As he made his way back to his original seat, leaving Hotch to his thoughts, Gideon’s smile faded and he suppressed a heavy sigh. One of the best men he had ever known was sitting at that far end of the plane, and the tragic thing was that he didn’t even know it. But, Gideon thought, that was what he was there for. Sometimes his job was more than just stopping the damaged people of the world who thought the best way to fix themselves was to lash out at others. Other times, his job was to do the best he could to fix the profoundly damaged people who found their way into the BAU. In many ways, that part of his job was even more thankless than the first. He wasn’t always successful. He’d outright failed, more often than not.

But in this case, he was hopeful. Hotch had a wife, a young son, an accomplished career behind him and a promising one ahead. He was brilliant, he was kind, and though his wounds ran deep, his strength ran deeper. All Gideon had to do was remind him of that every once in awhile. And that- he thought to himself as he sat down, glanced around at his team and once again marvelled at the company he’d found himself in- well, that was almost a privilege.

_“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars." -_ Khalil Gibran, philosopher


End file.
